Week of June 29, 1999

Time to catch up on a few things. Was busy Sunday at the 18th birthday party for our friend Scott Rainey. I was the chosen one on the grill and I want you to know that I properly celebrated his birthday after presents, cake and ice cream by finding my way to the couch and snoozing.

Thanks for pointing out the cut and paste errors, which hopefully I have fixed now. I must admit that I need to go back and rename the first pages in directories to index.htm. When I started building this site I did not know the effect not using index.htm in each sub directory had and have been very lazy not to go back and fix this. Maybe you have motivated me and I will begin by taking one subdirectory at a time.

There was a note in the business section of yesterday's Winston Salem Journal that BellSouth was beginning to roll out ADSL service, so naturally I called the baby bell to see if it was available in my area. Naturally, the answer was not yet. I live so far away from an antiquated central office that I may never be eligible for the service. However, there is a sub-station near our home, which allowed me to have ISDN service, so maybe there is hope for ADSL. It looks like the phone company is trying to beat Time-Warner cable to the punch. TW is allegedly going to roll out cable modems by the end of this year or in the first quarter of 2000. Looks like the score is BellSouth 1, Time-Warner 0. TW hasn't publicly said anything about cable modems yet.

I received the following from my sister via email today. Since we have a couple of little crumb crunchers she thought I would find it amusing, which I did.

1. Never trust a dog to watch your food. (Patrick, age 10)

2. When your dad is mad and asks you, "Do I look stupid?" don't answer him. (Michael, 14)

3. Never tell your mom her diet's not working. (Michael, 14)

4. Stay away from prunes. (Randy, 9)

5. Never pee on an electric fence. (Robert, 13)

6. Don't squat with your spurs on. (Noronha, 13)

7. Don't pull dad's finger when he tells you to. (Emily, 10)

8. When your mom is mad at your dad, don't let her brush your hair. (Taylia, 11)

9. Never allow your three-year old brother in the same room as your school assignment. (Traci, 14)

10. Don't sneeze in front of mom when you're eating crackers. (Mitchell, 12)

11. Puppies still have bad breath even after eating a tic tac. (Andrew, 9)

12. Never hold a dust buster and a cat at the same time. (Kyoyo, 9)

13. You can't hide a piece of broccoli in a glass of milk. (Armir, 9)

14. Don't wear polka-dot underwear under white shorts. (Kellie, 11)

15. If you want a kitten, start out by asking for a horse. (Naomi, 15)

16. Felt markers are not good to use as lipstick. - Lauren, 9

17. Don't pick on your sister when she's holding a baseball bat. (Joel, 10)

18. When you get a bad grade in school, show it to your mom when she's on the phone.
(Alyesha, 13)

19. Never try to baptize a cat. (Eileen, 8)

The Winston No Bull Showdown is next week at Bristol Dragway and is a unique event. In fact there is none other like it on NHRA's Winston Drag Racing circuit. Therefore, I deemed it worthy of its own page. I have included pages on who's qualified, a fact sheet for the Showdown and some driver quotes, courtesy of the PR boys at RJR's Sports Marketing Enterprises division.

It will be interesting if RJR comes through with a 10% stock dividend on the newly spun-off company. Some stock analysts are expecting RJR to pay as much as $3.00 a year in dividends.

Microsoft has some accessories for IE5 they claim will speed up your web experience. Probably some features they should have included in the original release had they not been in a hurry to push it out the door. You can download these web accessories from Microsoft's Product Insider page

My friend Bob Thompson and I both use pair Networks to host our websites. We also use Microsoft FrontPage as an HTML editor and general site tool. We both had FrontPage extensions installed on the server at pair as well. Bob has been having some problems with FrontPage extensions lately timing out when he published his web to the server and ultimately had pair remove the FP extensions. I got a scare last night when I received the following error message when attempting to publish:

Fortunately I was able to publish later and determined (on my own, congrats to me) that maybe this was just a timeout problem. Maybe the network was busy or maybe it was the fact that Katie and I both were surfing the internet from other machines on our LAN, sucking all of the bandwidth away from FP. I had an email from pair support today informing me that it was indeed a timeout error and I should try publishing again.

The very fisrt day I attempted to publish this I must have attempted to publish about 20 times before I could get it all uploaded. I guess I just freaked because of the problems Bob has been having and immediately assumed the worst...that I was headed for the same fate. Hopefully not.

I am not much of a coffee drinker and in fact have just started to enjoy the brew in the last couple of years. I still have to use generous amounts of cream! So I chuckled today when I heard that Starbucks profits had quit soaring and they were going to have a hard time fulfilling their earnings prognostications. Aren't they the ones who started this high price cup of coffee from a coffee house craze anyway. For a while I was finding myself following the herd to the Strabucks kiosk in the airport and paying nearly five bucks for a tall Moca, but fortunately cameot my senses. Maybe the rest of America is heading the same way.

You may start seeing even more ads on your internet pages if this report is true. CNET is planning to spend over $100 million on marketing its brand over the next 18 months and Yahoo is expanding its relationship with the nation's heftiest advertisier, Proctor and Gamble. Can they make soap pour out of your monitor? Can't be long.

I haven't mentioned anything from ZDTV in a while, so when I saw this on the battle between proxy servers and lan modems I thought I would pass it along. I've been both routes and am currently using a LAN modem. I used the Wingate proxy server, which I liked very much except that it killed my dialup connection to the office. Prior to installing Wingate I could negotiate a successfull login with the office and have Outlook up in about four minutes, complete with mail folders. With the proxy server running it was taking about 16 minutes for the same task. When I removed the proxy server and installed the LAN modem it was back to four minutes. I am sure that I could have configured something to make both connections live together happily but I never figured out what the problem was until I removed Wingate. If we ever get ADSL or cable modem in our neighborhood I will probably resurrect Wingate.

I have been thinking about installing a small telephone key system in our house for some time. We currently have more phone lines in our home than I want to admit, so this would be one way of bringing everything together with the added benefit of an intercom system. I also want to take an old PC and turn it into a voice mail machine for the family. Bob Thompson and John Mikol use the BigMouth voice mail card from Talking Technology to perform this same task at their house, but until today I have not been able to locate a source for the BigMouth. I think I may have stumbled across Talking Technology and the BigMouth today, so I am sure interest in this project will be reignited. I'll bet Suzy can hardly wait.

Thanks again for bringing these hyperlink problems to my attention. I think I have them fixed now. The problem on the June 8 was the extension. thm doesn’t seem to work as well as .htm

I guess the yellows do make it a bit more interesting. I always wondered who that French driver Jacques Debris was. He seems to cause a lot of problems.

What is your involvement at JSC. I have gone through the visitor’s center a couple of times when down in Baytown for the Winston Drag race. We stay at the Hilton there on NASA Road One.

I continue to find it interesting how many visitors we have and from how many different countries. I think some of the latest entries are from Gibralter and Papua New Guinea. All of this information can be found on our stat pages. I have pulled the domain listing into a separate page. In June we had our busiest week in June, when the week of June 20 we had a total of 3597 requests and 974 pages were downloaded. Wonder how many of these hits were me? I'll never tell.

Every once in a while I throw something here about Linux. I can't remember if I have shared this, but if not, here's a site where the can grab Linux on 1 floppy disk. It's referred to as the most Linux on 1 floppy disk, which I am told can serve you well if you need an emergency Linux disk or are having trouble with your Linux system in general. I still have one machine that I want to bring up as a Linux box, but I have also learned that I need more help and instruction in Linux, 'cause I am lost. I have only been able to fit one of the local Piedmont Linux Users Group meetings into my schedule. Unfortunately they meet on a Thursday night and I am frequently out of town on Thursdays.

If you are anything like me you never throw away any piece of computer equipment, but eventually you have a basement full of obsolete computer pieces. It's not worth your while to run a classified ad to sell this junk and you are depressed that the 2400 baud modem you paid better than $300 a few years ago is now worthless. You could give the stuff to a school or a charity, but the tax deduction and the trouble is hardy worth it. What do you do with it then?

There are several places on the web you can use to liquidate these valuable pieces of merchandise. Remember "one man's junk is another's treasure" or at least that's what the yard sale folks claim. Of course there are usual auction sites like eBay and even Yahoo has a site for auctions. There are more auctions site popping up daily than you would want to count.

There area also some PC equipment liquidates out there on the web, including The Used Computer Mall, which I think works much like eBay in that you are selling your junk directly top another user via the auction process. If you want to donate your equipment to a school, but don't know which way to turn you might check out the PEP (Parents, Educators, Publishers), which offers a Directory of Computer Recycling Programs. And Although I have not check out this site, Orion Research Corporation supposedly offers a service to provide you with "blue book" prices for used computer equipment. Sounds a lot like car dealers to me!

If you've been thinking about Linux, but haven't made the jump there is another installfest, where the local Piedmont Linux Users Group helps us newbies get it installed and going, planned for Saturday, July 10. These events are usually held at Intrex in the Nations Bank Building at Stratford Rd. & Knollwood Ave. in Winston-Salem. These events usually last from about 10:00am to 4:00pm.

If you are considering taking you machine to this Installfest take a minute to download the hardware checklist from the PLUG knowledgebase. If you complete this information before landing on Stratford Road with your PC it will make the installation goes smoother. At least that's what I hear. I haven't personally made it to an installfest yet.

NASCAR's conservative ways may have bit them in the butt recently. I heard a couple weeks ago that NASCAR would not allow Kevin LePage to run in an event with a graphic of the buxom wrestler Sable on the hood of his car. I did not know at the time this graphic was a depiction of the TV guide cover featuring Sable. So this is a yet another reminder the pen is mightier than the sword. Apparently TV Guide was planning a cover story feature four Winston Cup hot shots and then when NASCAR decreed that Sable was just too sexy for its family values sport TV Guide countered by pulling the planned four covers featuring the Winston Cup boys of summer. A classic case of I'll show you and yet another reminder that you can't argue with the one who has the typewriter, don't get in a pissing contest with a skunk, etc. I would bet that NASCAR has been trying to flex it muscle behind the scenes to get these covers reinstated, but it has not yet been successful according to Mike Mulhern's report on the Winston-Salem Journal's PitNow website. I would also wager the competition department and the marketing boys down in Daytona Beach have been trying to convince each other of the other's point of view doing the last week.

I decided yesterday to try to get my Jaz drive to work once again. I didn't have any luck, once again. I had this SCSI Jaz drive on the system named BamBam and working just fine until a few months ago. I then worked a trade for this SCSI wide differential drive that I had purchased by mistake for a Seagate 4 gig SCSI drive. One this same system I also had a SCSI Envisions scanner and a Kodak photo printer. When I added the internal SCSI hard drive I could not longer get the Jaz drive to work, so I naturally thought it was just that the SCSI chain had exceeded it's limit, so I just removed the Jaz drive and everything else worked just fine.

In the meantime I had added a SCSI card to WILMA (the 350mhz system I built around the Seattle board) and tried the SCSI drive there, but no dice. Since I wasn't that familiar with SCSI I thought maybe I just had something configured wrong so I said the hell with it and put the Jaz drive away for a while. If you knew me at all you would assume I wasn't going to let this go long before I started trying to figure out what was going on and why I was having trouble.

Yesterday was that day. I decided to pull the scanner off the original system and move it over to Wilma since she was a faster machine and had more/faster memory. I use Adobe PhotoShop for my scanning activities I thought this was a good move anyway. More memory and a faster processor would be good for any graphics work. I got the scanner moved over and installed on Wilma with no problem.

It then went back to BamBam and installed the Jaz drive. Windows recognized the drive and assigned drive letter F:\ to the removable drive. but I still could not access the drive. I then went back and ran the the Iomega setup program. It saw the drive and also installed it as drive F:\, but when it came time to finish the installation from the Jaz Tools disk (I guess you call these things disks) it claims it could not read drive F and to make sure I had the tools disk inserted properly. Go ahead, insult what little intelligence I have. Well, I went through this a couple of times, evening trying just to read a Jaz disk that I had previously used to store data, still no dice and I finally gave up. I even tried running the Guest.exe program which supposedly makes this thing portable. No luck. Said to hell with it. I am thinking about logging a problem on the Iomega web site, but for now the Jaz drive has found a home in the junk closet.

There's evidence that the internet e-mail system is being used for more than just virus hoaxes and spam. I am sure we all saw stories reported about the explosion at a gasoline station when some one refueling their car and talking on their cell phone at the same time. Well, apparently this story is a hoax, at least according to the way it was reported cell phone trade group (CTIA- Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association) in today's answer column in today's Winston-Salem Journal.

It also appears this newspaper was involved in what you might call a sting operation on some governmental organizations. The Winston-Salem Journal joined with other newspapers and the press associations in North Carolina to see how the government would fare when asked for public records. These agencies are supposed to turn over this information without objection when asked, either by a citizen or a member of the media. It doesn't look it happened that way very often.

It appears the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is going to make it to its new perch much quicker than originally predicted. The lighthouse, which is being moved some 2900 feet to protect it from the encroaching ocean, is less than 1,000 feet from its new home and about a week ahead of schedule. It looks like the engineers have resorted to something you and I have used around our respective homes to make the move go so smoothly to this point. They are greasing the track with bars of Ivory soap. I'll bet you there is a commercial looming in there somewhere. I think Proctor and Gamble is the maker of Ivory, so maybe some of these ads Yahoo is promising from P&G will show the boys on the coast greasing up the rails of the lighthouse moving equipment with bars of Ivory soap. Here is a (almost) live WebCam shot from the lighthouse and Daily Progress Reports of the lighthouse move.

Late Afternoon: This is the first Pepsi 400 (July race) I have missed in Daytona in quite some time. Jimmy Holder (my assistant) is holding down the fort for me while I enjoyed the afternoon at the pool with the kids. It's ironic that Suzy and the kids will be heading for Daytona (ormond Beach, actually) tomorrow for a couple of weeks relaxation at Granddaddy's while I head off to the Winston Drag events in Bristol, TN and Denver, CO. In years past we could combine our annual pilgrimage to Suzy's dad's house with the Pepsi 400, but it didn't work out this year. They will enjoy all of the Florida amenities, which will include dropping in the pool just out the back door and then just a few more feet past the pool you can peer into one of Florida's many canals and watch for the baby alligators and manatees. It's not unusual to see either in the afternoon. He lives at the end of one of the canal's, so I guess the wildlife considers this safe haven from the pesky motorboats. This canal is actually back water from the Tomoka River which feeds into the Intercostal Waterway. Katie's favorite animal is the Florida Manatee which I suppose developed from watching the critters during these annual trips south. I tried taking some photos of the alligators with my Sony Mavica camera last year but didn't have much luck. Between their natural camaflouge working overtime, the camera's auto focus and my not so steady hand with the camera I was out of luck.